Studio: Fleischer Studios (Color Classics)
Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Produced by: Max Fleischer
Short Synopsis
Spunky, the young burro introduced in Hunky and Spunky, is the brat of the barnyard. While his mother Hunky looks on he makes a nuisance of himself with every animal on the farm: he kicks over the pig's trough, pulls the rooster's tail, teases the dog, breaks up the hens' sitting and chases the ducks off the pond, and every animal's complaint to Hunky is met with a mother's indulgence. The farm animals hold a meeting and decide that the brat must be taught a lesson, and they set about it with the tricks he has played on them turned round, until Spunky is thoroughly outmanoeuvred and comes crying to his mother. Hunky, who has seen it all, sides with the animals for once, and Spunky, for the moment, mends his ways.
Why It Matters
- It is the second Hunky and Spunky cartoon, following the Oscar-nominated original, and it turns the stubborn, sympathetic foal of the first film into a pest, a change that made the series a conventional naughty-child comedy; Myron Waldman's burros are still well drawn, and the farm animals' revenge is briskly staged.
- It is in the US public domain; the television distributor let its copyright run out in the 1950s. The Spunky series ran to seven films through 1940, outlasting the Color Classics banner it started under.
Notes and Trivia
- Anthony Pabian, co-animator, was one of the Miami hires of 1938.
- The barnyard-meeting-against-the-pest plot was borrowed from Disney's Mickey cartoons.
- See also: Hunky and Spunky (1938), A Kick in Time (1940), Snubbed by a Snob (1940).
